The Elephant Man

Just a quick note and a few observations while watching David Lynch's The Elephant Man:

I've read a lot of stuff by Michel Foucault recently, and made it all the way through The Birth of the Clinic and History of Madness.  I first read his stuff on sexuality for my undergraduate degree, and have since had a morbid interest in the Victorian era.

I bought an old compilation of American adverts (circa 1865-1900) from a second hand store store in Aberdare, which is a small town directly north of the Welsh capital, Cardiff.  In the book can be found a range of unfounded superlatives about all and sundry: from storm cameras to invalid hammocks, the objective and universal tone is employed to promote a wide variety of products.  An example is an advert published by Columbia Bicycles claiming that their product is 'A Delight to Everyone', the irony of an advert on the same page promoting bikes aimed at 'Cripples (in large font), Ladies and girls...', was not lost on me.  This ad is less adventurous with its claims, merely saying that it is cheap 'for all'.  The rest of the products range from anachronistic medical devices like liver pads, to the absurd (Solar Horse Bonnet anyone?), many with 'recommendations' from medical authorities who are seldom named.

I'll make this post short, so I'll have to speak in general terms (there will be more on this), but I think the fascination that comes with seeing these sorts of images is the ability to understand exactly what the people who drew up these adverts are trying to do.  I'm sure it's not much more difficult to do the same now: if someone were to compile a series of adverts from this year, then I'm sure their framing within a book would remove them from the environment they normally habituate and disarm them of the power which they usually have over us.  I suppose the power of an advert comes from it pouncing upon you when you least expect it, like someone approaching you upon false pretences, say asking for directions, then asking for a cigarette.

But I don't think that this is all there is to it, and I think Foucault is correct in saying that the language, or the discourse used in a certain epoch enmeshes and binds us to a whole series of statements which are, in mainstream discourse, accepted unquestioningly as objective truths.  It becomes obvious to see the absurd and mendacious statements understood as objective fact in these articles (which I will start posting up here, because they are great reading and, as far as I'm aware, the book has fallen out of print).  It is somewhat impossible to read the William Hill or a Virgin Media advert in the same way it is possible to read these adverts from another age.  Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I have no sort of utility for these objects, and I'm really looking, reading and writing about them in a manner that is divorced from the product's utility value, something I cannot dissociate when reading a car advert.  Although I do not, and never plan to, drive, the car advert still has a range of meanings which connect (or don't) in a very immediate sense to my situation in the world, and it is impossible to look at it in the same disinterested way I can an advert with the heading: 'The Mystery of Love-Making Solved (Or an Easy Road to Marriage)'.

Furthermore, I'm able to do this because statements like of this sort, which convey knowledge which is no longer admissible as objective, the 'epistemes' in Foucaultian speak, seems ridiculous and can instantly be seen through, categorised and understood.  The mystery of the advert dissipates immediately, and I do not fall under its spell.  Not that this matters; most of the companies have folded anyway.  However the obsession with physique expressed through the frequent use of human drawings which resemble medical schematics, alongside the techniques used to gain attention, everything from optical illusions to groan inducing puns (imagine a drawing of a scrawny cat, accompanied with text something like: this is not a very big or nice cat, but we will send you a nice and big CAT-alogue...), are easily understood and allow links to be drawn much more quickly.  I suppose everything is easier to taxonify when you believe yourself to be above it in some manner, and I suppose the implicit authority here is that I am more versed than the average Victorian Mad Man in adverts, because I have grown up being surrounded by them, and have probably experienced more by time I was a toddler than he experienced in his whole life.

In short then, part of the fascination with Victorian era media and artefacts is their ability to simultaneously show crude notions, by today's standards, which were still able to seem to an audience as categorically correct.  The fascination for me is that it enables one to exercise judgement in regards to the control modern advertising and media has over my actions and the actions of the institutions which concern me, in a direct and indirect manner.  It enables me try to see past the hype and understand things as being hype machines and fads, and developments in science and medicine which are a big deal and have the potential to change people's lives for the better.  It also enables me to, not fully, for the reasons already noted, but to exercise a degree of critical judgement it's very possible I wouldn't have if it were not for witnessing advertising in its nascent form, as contained in the pages of this book, and in other adverts not from the last decade or so (quick side note -- I think that adverts have their hold on an audience, when it comes to fads and rages, for about ten years, although I have nothing to back that up apart from experience and a hunch, for now).

SO quickly back to Lynch's The Elephant Man.  In the opening stages of the film we see John Merrick swooped from the arms of a sadistic and somewhat homo-erotic relationship with his owner, who profits from him by displaying him in freak shows.  Anthony Hopkin's doctor places him in a medical theatre, and this forms one of the tensions of the film: the changing of environment, but not the principles: he may be in cleaner living conditions and rubbing shoulders with high society, yet Merrick is still the object of grim fascination, at first by the medical community, and once it becomes apparent that he cannot be cured and loses his value as a medical curiosity, then becomes a cultural one, ogled at by Victorian London's glitterati.  This then begs the question: is his life qualitatively different in these more sanitary conditions, for it almost seems an act of cruelty to place him within the sort of company that he can never fully be a part of thanks to his disabilities (this is seen dramatically when he breaks down upon meeting the doctor's wife when in invited to his home for supper, muttering between sobs that he is unaccustomed to being greeted so kindly by a beautiful woman) .  His life with his master was miserable and painful, but looking over the other side of the precipice and seeing bourgeois familial life only served to increase his awareness of his difference, and see the another life which he could only experience as a outsider looking in.

Of the course the answer to this is very, very complex, probably more complex than the question as I have formed it.  However as we see at the end of the film, Merrick gazes at the picture of the small boy sleeping without a mountain of pillows and removes them, thus deciding to destroy himself.  The increased articulation he has gained whilst residing in the hospital has allowed him to put into words, conceptualise and thus recognise the gulf between him and the majority of other people.  This has condemned him to a solitary life as an outsider looking in, and so he decides to have one night, at least, when he can experience life as the people around him do, lying on his back.

I'm not going to go into the implicit problems of this, and the undertones of normalisation the film, produced only in the eighties, blithely carries (I have never fallen asleep on my back!), in this post, however I will say that the medical gaze, and the actions of the doctor, at least, are in a lot of ways similar to the actions of the visitors to the Elephant man attraction at the fair ground.  I think that witnessing medicine in its nascent stage, like advertising, and like psychoanalysis of this period, which practised face and head measuring to make decisions about a subject's moral character and by extension, for they were inextricably linked in Victorian medical discourse, the internal mental realm of an individual, allows for an observer to see highly questionable forms of knowledge which were full believed to be objective fact in mainstream culture.  In the case of The Elephant Man, it is quite easy to equivocate the morbid curiosity of the doctor as an institutionalised version of a similar compulsion which populated fairgrounds of this time.  There's an incredible bit at the beginning of The Birth of Medicine where Foucault compares the language used by a medical practitioner, who describes the thin film of membrane above the brain as being like 'uncooked egg white'.  Another proscribes for a woman with 'hysteria', a condition which is longer included within medical textbooks, a series of baths, for nine hours a day, for six months.  She dies an horrific death, directly due to these baths which the practitioner in questioner must've had scant evidence apart from a hunch to believe would act as a cure.  In light of the distance a modern reader has of such accounts, it enables a sceptical view to be held towards so many forms of medical knowledge which are uncritically accepted as being beyond question.  Like the Victorian adverts, the power of the institutions lies in us being inextricably linked to the same epistemes, and ultimately, the same acceptance of certain facts about the human body and the psyche as being objective and beyond question.  I suppose that's what makes difficult, and I mean this in the difficulty of comprehension (getting to a point where a thinker has the confidence to criticise a doctor) and difficulty of responsibility (that if a person is wrong in criticising the medical establishment, then people's lives are at stake).

(Here is a link to an Al Jazeera opinion piece which discusses big pharmacy and the control which it has over the formation of discourses surrounding mental health.  This is sort of what I am trying to get at: how difficult it is to think outside of a paradigm (ie. put simply, that anti-depressants are the cure for depression) which has been manipulated by private interests and ultimately how future generations may look back and think that current attitudes towards such matters are incredibly naive http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117313948379987.html)

Double Take

Double Take - A sort of video essay, penned by the novelist and conceptual artist Tom McCarthy and based upon a Jose Luis Borges short story about the author meeting his doppleganger one morning in the mid eighties.  McCarthy has instead taken this notion and placed Hitchcock in the central role, with the conversation between two the Alfreds, one from the sixties, one from the eighties, being visualised with clips from The Master of Suspense's own films and television efforts, news reels from the cold war and newly shot footage.

The new content accompanying the dialogue between the doubles is mainly close ups, of a raven perched here and a coffee cup there.  Furthermore, interviews are carried out with Hitchcock lookalikes, and their ruminations about the connection they have with the director.  These are a good way to begin to understand the film.  One speaks about how there was a very real chance that he may have rubbed shoulders with Hitchcock during his stint working at a hotel frequented by the director.  This is the sort of associative speculation which allows the film to imply a connection with Hitchcock to former Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev, presumably because the pair were both bald and somewhat overweight.

I'm writing this blog whilst watching old Adam Curtis documentaries, and the comparison between his It Felt Like a Kiss, shown at The Manchester International Festival in 2009 and Double Take is an obvious but justified one (I think).  Double Take lacks the clarity of expression enjoyed by the works of Curtis, yet makes the same sort of critical connection between art and political events.  Double Take will at time invite the occasional rolling of eyes with the connection between fifties and sixties film and the sense of doom inherent in Cold War new coverage now seeming to be old hat after the successes of Mad Men, Blue Velvet and the endless revisionist books and documentaries of events like the Bay of Pigs or Kennedy's assassination.

((((I am revising the grammar on this post six months after I posted it))))

The film manages to keep interest through its presentation which, for the most part, is cryptic and obscure.  The way it flits between the lookalike interviews, old news reels and its presentation of the Cuban Missile Crisis is disconcerting at times, and I spent most of my time trying to understand what it exactly this film was presenting, than engaging with what I could glean from this to-ing and fro-ing.  Some of the footage I had never seen before, like the first televised trans-atlantic satellite image, and the film seems to be a great way to present this sort of material in a manner which does not bore those tired of the formulaic presentation of history which has sadly become the norm for documentary making.  This sort of presentation, which effectively employs music and footage from a variety of sources in order to create an argument by association, seems to be an appropriate, and powerful use of the medium of film to communicate ideas about politics, aesthetics, history and art.  However, Double Take falls flat, sadly, and I think it's because of the obfuscatory manner in which it is presented.  I suspect that this only serves to camouflage the linear parallel drawn between the horror of Hitchcock's films and the horror experienced by millions of people during this period, glued to developments in world politics, worried about the very real danger of nuclear apocalypse.

The film doesn't seem to explore idea concerning anything other than a linear parallel between the factual and the imaginary, the real and the fictive.  There are vague allusions to notions like the manufacturing of fear within films of the fifties and sixties, but again this seems terrain covered by many facets of popular culture like The Simpson and South Park, who each have devoted episodes sending up the absurdity of The Red Scare.  The recounting of history is again fairly mundane, and while brief, due to the probable assumption that the audience is already familiar with the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Space Race, et al, again it sparks no revelations or attempts to give another take on it.  Seeing as this is the only way to judge the film clearly, it makes me suspect that there is nothing more to this film than an unsophisticated cultural theory, which alludes to ideas like the construction of desires and need through advertising (seen explicitly when sixties Alfred questions why eighties Alfred is drinking coffee instead of the customary Hitchcock beverage of choice, tea, and gets the response that choices change, this juxtaposed with coffee commercials which spattered his American television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents...), and the increase in communication and aerospace technology, allowing television and the space race respectively, having a political content to them.

But again the film fails to give an interesting slant on these ideas, and they seem under-developed whilst hiding behind a veneer of cryptic presentation.  They become almost commonsensical when compared to the work being produced by film-makers like Adam Curtis and Chris Petit.  Double Take's excellent concept seems wasted on an argument which simply seems to express mild disapproval of advertising, foreign policy by the East and West in the Cold War and parallels between the political zeitgeist and the films being released in this era.  Clearly the film is trying to do more than this, with the studio lighting and cameras being made visable on screen clearly attempting to place film technics at the forefront of the viewers mind.  The advertising footage being juxtaposed with film and news stocks then nudges the viewer towards the sort of ideas expressed by a thinker like Walter Benjamin in his essay 'Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', and the idea that films are shaped by all sorts of economic and political factors which are pushed to the back of an audience's mind when experiencing the film.  The use of Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense, as subject matter, along with footage showing the kaleidoscopic series of guises he assumed during his television show seems telling: that the economic and political interests behind any good film are disguised by good film making.  It what makes bad B-movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Vincent Price villains all the more ridiculous to modern viewers - the thinly veiled fear or hatred of the cultural and sexual other using bad special effects or mincing WASPs with pencil moustaches.

To end I will go to the end of the film and the beginning.  The film ends with, once again, an allusion, albiet a very explicit one, to Hitchcock's last film, the terrible Soviet set farce Topaz.  This, and the various connections drawn between the fear of nuclear winter due to international tensions and the apocalyptic vision of The Birds, could be interpreted in this way: that we should see Hitchcock not simply as the auteur, making developments within film technique, but as expressing a certain fin de siecle, and by extension a series of private and political interests.  This might not be correct, because the film still remains, in tone at least, a warm hearted homage to the director.

However, you never really know, and this is what is so frustrating about this film, and, in my opinion, is what takes the teeth from the film's argument.  Perhaps this is a stylistic homage to Hitchcock, and this could be backed up with a quick jump to the beginning.  A clip is played from a chat show, in which Hitchcock makes a joke about a Lion and the word MacGuffin.  The MacGuffin, a narrative technique typically used by Hitchcock in order to divert the viewers attention in order to set the narrative up for the classic Hitchcockian twist.  Perhaps this film is making a comment on itself, and trying to avoid the lazy documentary technique of presenting an objective argument, of which it is the equally objective and impartial conduit, and this implicitly exercising a set of economic, political and whole other series of interests.  This notion is admirable, however the arguments of the film are nebulous and difficult even for a diligent viewer to hold onto.  This has the danger of rendering the content of the film impenetrable, inert and ineffectual.